1. Yasser Arafat (1994) – Arafat won the award alongside Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres “for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East” as represented by the Oslo Accords which set out a five-year transitional period for Israeli forces to withdraw from occupied territories and for a Palestinian authority to be set up and establish a permanent settlement.

This was perhaps one of the most controversial of awards because of Arafat’s history of, by most any standards, presiding over a corrupt, violent and authoritarian regime. Yet the Nobel committee has shown an incredible ability to focus solely on perceived good deeds at the expense of context, illustrating why Putin’s nomination could be in good stead.

Copyright: Demosh, Wikimedia Creative Commons.

2. Wangari Maathai (2004) — Maathai was the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for “her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace,” and the award was widely praised as a recognition of a woman creating social change.

3. Henry Kissinger (1973) — Kissinger was awarded the prize jointly with Vietnamese revolutionary Le Duc Tho (though the latter turned it down) regarding his role in negotiating a ceasefire to end the Vietnamese war. In reality, not only did the war not conclude until 1975, Kissinger had been instrumental in crafting the Nixon era policies that escalated the Vietnam war.

Furthermore, Kissinger’s role as Secretary of State and his alleged (though broadly evidenced) involvement in a number of heavily questionable attacks including the U.S. bombing campaigns in Cambodia to name just one, has for critics brought the Peace Prize into disrepute.

4. Mother Teresa (1979) – You may be shocked to see Mother Teresa’s name on this list. Indeed, the abiding legacy is of the saintly and diminutive holy figure who tended to the poor and generally improved life for countless impoverished families. Notably, she won the prize for her “humanitarian work.”

The late Christopher Hitchens wrote extensively on why the simple notion of Teresa as a meek and selfless nun is false. Regardless, for our purposes we need only note that Teresa was aggressively against a woman’s right to choose, and that she in fact used her peace prize acceptance speech to wage the following attack:

‘We speak of peace … I think that today peace is threatened by abortion, too, which is a true war, the direct killing of a child by its own mother. In the Bible we read that God clearly said: ‘Even though a mother did forget her infant, I will not forget him.’ Today, abortion is the worst evil, and the greatest enemy of peace. We who are here today were wanted by our parents. We would not be here if our parents had not wanted us. We want children, and we love them. But what about the other millions? Many are concerned about the children, like those in Africa, who die in great numbers either from hunger or for other reasons. But millions of children die intentionally, by the will of their mothers. Because if a mother can kill her own child, what will prevent us from killing ourselves, or one another? Nothing.’

Teresa was also against the use of condoms, believing the prevention of conception to be a sin.

Teresa’s anti-abortion message is largely understood to have kept the wheels greased on several anti-abortion political machines ranging throughout Europe — particularly in Ireland — and even in the United States. In giving Teresa the Peace Prize and therein providing her yet another international stage, the committee allowed for her to do the work of the Catholic Church and attack women’s choice head on, something we still hear the echoes of today.

5. Cordell Hull (1945) – Hull won the peace prize for his role in helping to establish the United Nations. What the committee apparently overlooked was the fact that then Secretary of State Hull, together with the Southern Democrats, had been instrumental in having President Franklin D. Roosevelt turn away the S.S. St Louis, which was carrying 937 Jewish refugees seeking asylum from Nazi persecution.

Hull threatened to withdraw support from Roosevelt in the upcoming elections if he allowed the refugees on American soil. Roosevelt duly turned the ship away on June 6, 1939. It returned to Europe and while the U.S. did work with Britain to find safety for the refugees, more than a quarter of those who had sought asylum later died in the Holocaust.

Hull himself is not considered to have been an anti-Semite, but his reticence to engage with the worsening situation faced by Jews in Nazi Germany and his broader aims at not seeming to be in the pocket of the Jewish community so as to save his future political ambitions add up to a marked oversight by the Nobel Committee.

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Obama should have been on that list - since he did zip to earn the Peace Prize (something which he himself essentially admitted).

This prize has been devalued - it's supposed to go to someone who has accomplished something really significant in stopping physical conflict. It's not something which should be used to further PC goals and to reward feel-good behavior.

And although I agree Mother Teresa shouldn't have been awarded the prize it has nothing to do with the recipient's views on abortion.

The Nobel Peace Prize is almost always just as much about encouraging future behavior as it is about rewarding past behavior - hence Kissinger gets it for a war still in progress, Obama gets it for speaking as nicely to the Arab world as to Israel, and Arafat, an actual terrorist turned politician, gets it for Oslo. Recognizing this, a man who has brutally suppressed an insurgency in a region seeking independence as it has been doing since it's annexation more than 500 years ago (Chechnya), who invaded a little neighbor that pissed him off (Georgia) makes perfect sense. Putin had been protecting the Assad regime from any kind of interference from the UN. When Assad was dumb enough to gas his own people and cross the line drawn by a POTUS who has no compunction about using the precision weaponry available to him, Putin started out by lying and blustering, but eventually came around to admitting that his protégé had those nasty weapons after all and offered to make him give them up. It's not easy for any of us to admit when we've been caught in a lie, and it's even harder for megalomaniacal autocrats; for that alone, Vlad deserves the prize. We're all better off with the chemical weapons being removed. It was only a matter of time before one went off in Moscow thanks to those Chechens, but eventually one would have made it to New York.

I'm still wondering how Obama deserves a PEACE prize. In fact, if one considers that the US and the UK are the world's worst war-mongers and always have been, no American or Briton should ever qualify for a peace prize of any sort.

The Nobel Peace Prize means NOTHING anymore. If the committee really wanted to award a truly deserving person, they would look no further than Malala Yousafzai, the brave Pakistani girl who demanded an education for girls, stood up to the Taliban, and was shot in the head for her trouble. Now she is safe in England and spreading her message of positivity and courage throughout the world.